My husband and I chose The Elms Hotel and Spa for our wedding day. We had the ceremony outdoors in the gazebo, and the reception inside in the Grand Ballroom. The actual day of the wedding was beautiful, most everything went according to plan.
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The planning process months prior however, was not at all a pleasant experience. We booked the venue in early December and had the wedding in August. We ran into many bumps in the road that made working with The Elms extremely stressful and difficult. Wedding coordinators were very difficult to get a hold of, taking at least 3-7 days to finally get in contact with someone. It didn't matter if you called or emailed, it was also very hard to reach someone/have them call you back.
First off, the wedding coordinator that we were working with supposedly lost all of our data because her computer got a virus and deleted everything. To my surprise, especially since the Elms plans events routinely, our information was not backed up or printed. Because of this, we had to have an additional appointment to go over literally everything we had just discussed.
We weren't too upset about this, because we know it's important to be patient and flexible because things can happen. But, we had another meeting after this redo meeting to discuss more details or changes, and the wedding coordinator (who was a different lady than previously) had not created the documents that had the grand totals, all the information and ect. She had literally not done any work since we met two weeks prior, and had made up excuses as to why she had not worked on our wedding...so my mother and I wasted hours of our day driving to the appointment when The Elms was not even prepared. You can imagine how frustrated we were since we were less than a month away from the wedding!
Finally the day of the wedding came, and The Elms staff were extremely helpful and accommodating. An issue that arose during the reception was that we initially had two bars, but the bartenders decided to close one of the bars, so we only had one bar with one bartender. After numerous attempts of trying to get someone to figure out this issue, they still decided to not keep the other bar open (which is NOT what we wanted), but instead put two bartenders at the one bar.
Also, there was some confusion with where all our gifts went. The day of event coordinator (a different lady who we paid $500 for) did not communicate where she was putting the gifts, so numerous family members were running around trying to find the missing gifts. It was annoying because she had already left for the night, which was only about 1.5 hours into the reception... Thankfully we found them, but they were in the wrong room.
Overall, the wedding day was wonderful. But if you want to book with The Elms, you must be patient and expect errors to occur. Keep records of all your payments and arrangements because they will most likely lose it. (They tried to charge us twice for the gazebo because they didn't have it in their records that we already paid.) Good luck!